Today’s WordPress community demands performance first and foremost.
Making a new website can be a daunting challenge. It demands creativity and insight, and a solid marketing strategy. It’s also an opportunity to put your design skills to use creating a great user experience for visitors.
But the standards by which we measure the user experience are constantly changing. Web creators must adapt to design trends and make sure their web assets conform to user expectations.
Elementor, one of the most reputable website builders in the WordPress community, recently polled thousands of users to identify these trends. It sent this survey through dedicated mail, included it in the brand’s magazines, and distributed it to the community. Our goal was to find out what today’s web creators and UX professionals value most in their work.
The result: We received more than 5000 valid responses with comprehensive demographic data, common pain points, and web design trends.
We analyzed this data to identify the latest insights into the WordPress industry as a whole. By publishing it now, we’re opening the door to a new frontier for web creation in 2022. Use these insights to improve your design strategy and build a more successful WordPress experience for clients and end users.
Demographic Insights on WordPress Web Creators
We started our survey by asking WordPress creators to state their age. Here’s a breakdown of the results we received:
While the largest age group is between 35 and44 years old, there were significant responses on both ends of this range too. There is a slightly larger cohort on the younger edge of this group (25-34)than the older one (45-54).
Remember: The WordPress community is growing every year.
The fact that the number of younger users is larger than the number of older users might mean that new WordPress users are getting younger over time. To say for certain, we’ll have to collect the same data for at least a few years and run a more thorough analysis.
Next, we asked participants to identify their gender:
The results are in. The majority of WordPress creators identify as male.
It’s worth pointing out that a full quarter of respondents identify as female. This aligns with demographic patterns in the greater IT sector, where women make up 25% of the technical workforce in tech enterprises as well. This number has been growing in recent years, and is likely to keep growing over time.
What Do UX Designers Worry About Most When Creating New Websites?
We asked user experience professionals to rate the various concerns they have when starting new projects. By analyzing their responses, we identified the top 11 major concerns that reflect the priorities of today’s users:
Let’s look at the three biggest ones:
1. Performance
Website performance tops the list as the number-one priority for WordPress website creators. There’s a good reason for this – a sluggish, unresponsive user experience is never a good one. There’s no design scheme that can get around that.
This is partly why Google has made its Core Web Vitals such an important part of its ranking algorithm. Since the world’s top websites load quickly and work effortlessly, everyday users now expect your website will too.
WordPress has proven itself capable of delivering a lightning-fast user experience. Just take a look at Robin J.E. Scott’s Fastest Website in the World.
Try for yourself and see:
Copy the link above into Google’s Page Speed Insights and click on Analyze. Robin’s desktop site gets a perfect 100 score and the mobile version scores in the high 90s. This impressive website experience is built on WordPress!
Most marketing professionals will insist your websites should score at least 80+ for desktop, and 40+ for mobile. These relatively modest figures are achievable with WordPress if you take the right approach to optimization.
Consider looking at some of these factors that deeply impact website speed and performance:
- Your website builder. A good website builder should run efficiently, not weigh down your website with complex loading logic and tons of extra JavaScript.
- Your hosting service. The more resources your host dedicates to your website, the faster and more reliably it will run. Don’t forget to choose a host that is compatible with your website builder, either. For example, Elementor offers cloud hosting for WordPress that comes with everything you need pre-installed and optimized.
- Your plugins. Every plugin you use adds a little bit of weight to the WordPress platform. Remove unnecessary plugins and try consolidating plugins whenever possible. Avoid using a feature-stuffed general plugin to do only one thing – there’s probably a leaner option out there.
- Your caching solution. Caching can help you offset some web page loading responsibilities and save you valuable server resources. Content Delivery Networks can achieve the same thing over vast distances, ensuring reliable performance on a global scale.
2. Finding Inspiration
Finding the right design inspiration is a challenge for any creative professional. This is particularly true for busy designers who have to work on multiple projects at once. If you don’t have clear, actionable data about your end users or their design preferences, you might feel like you’re working with a blank slate.
Everybody wants their website to be unique. But they also want their ideas to be practical. What looks like an inspired design choice at the beginning of the process can easily turn into an awkward one by the time the site is finished.
Not all design inspiration has to come from a deep, personal well of spiritual reflection. Even the most experienced professionals look at competitors and colleagues to find ways around creative walls. This is why Elementor introduced designer-ready, complete Full Site Kits last year. These are complete websites that can be configured and published in minutes – a perfect starting point for busy design professionals.
Some of the trends that today’s user experience experts are focusing on include:
- Narrative Visualization. Also known as “scrollytelling”, the idea is to use a sequence of images and animations to tell a story – not unlike a comic book. This provides your website visitors with a guided tour of your brand that they can take at their own pace.
- Nostalgic Imagery. The past has a special kind of emotional power. Web creators who turn towards analog typography and old-school imagery are harnessing that power to make their websites relatable to specific demographics. Blue effects and retro filters help establish a comforting, familiar atmosphere for users.
- Unexpected Feedback. Small gestures, minor animations, and microcopy can go a long way towards delighting website visitors. The tasteful addition of dynamic feedback in unexpected places can bring a sterile web experience to life. When done carefully, it shows personality along with an attention to detail that helps your brand stand out.
3. Process Management and Communication
Managing a remote creative team isn’t easy. Since agencies have shifted to a remote working model, many time-tested creative processes have undergone rapid change. In many cases, this has added to the uncertainty web creators often experience.
It has unfortunately become commonplace for web creators to work for hours on some feature or element that will inevitably get knocked down at the last minute. Clients can change scope, request new features, or simply lose track of things in ways that didn’t happen when everyone was brainstorming in an office conference room.
Today’s web professionals need to implement robust project management tools that help address some of these challenges. Clients, agencies, and creatives need a highly organized system for managing multiple projects with live updates and categorized project-specific channels. Solutions like Teamwork and Clickup have become must-haves for this kind of environment.
Top 10 Web Design Trends Creators Want to Learn About
We asked web professionals what web design trends they are most interested in learning about. Their responses provide valuable insight into the future of web design and digital marketing.
Let’s look at each one briefly:
- Improving Load Time & Page Speed. Again, website performance is a top priority for WordPress developers and UX designers. Everyone wants to maximize their PageSpeed Insight scores so they can guarantee a high-quality user experience. The best place to start is by actively researching Google’s Core Web Vitals guidelines on how to do it.
- Smart Content Load. Smart content loads based on user profile parameters. That means two different people accessing the same website will see two different sets of content uniquely suited to their needs. Dynamic visibility plugins allow web creators to configure smart content controls for just about any widget, column, or section on their website.
- Automation. Automating complex workflows reduces the amount of time, effort, and money that goes into low-value, high-volume work. Tools like Zapier allow small marketing agencies to compete with major firms, giving web creators the ability to automate almost anything, so they can spend more time doing what they do best.
- Progressive Web Apps. Web browsers have the power to act like native platform-specific apps. Progressive web app technology serves as a bridge between native apps and hosted web apps, allowing web creators to include valuable functionalities into their websites. Learn more about how progressive web apps work here.
- Micro Animations. These are small animations that encourage and approve certain user behaviors. This can be anything from visual feedback indicating a user clicked on the right link to a loading bar that shows how many steps are left in the signup process. Discover how you can use these small, functional animations to create an intuitive visual interface for your website’s users.
- Headless WordPress. Many websites use WordPress purely for its content management system, and rely on a different frontend stack to display content. This allows content and development teams to work independently of one another, potentially improving workflow and task efficiency.
- Webhooks. These function like APIs, except they connect apps in one direction only. This makes it easy to trigger data requests between apps without having to spend time developing a full API for the purpose. Learn more about what makes Webhooks and APIs different here.
- Accessibility. It’s not just brick-and-mortar stores that need to be accessible to people with physical, auditory, and visual disabilities. Websites should cater to these users too, providing a valuable user experience to everyone. Web accessibility goes well beyond disabilities, though – you can find out more on the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative website.
- Chatbots. Customer service is a classic example of a high-volume, low-value task that takes up a lot of time and effort. Chatbots can play an important role facilitating support communications and ensuring top-priority cases get resolved quickly. Find out how chatbots can help you here.
- Microinteractions. Small, meaningful tidbits of information that enhance the user experience are called microinteractions. These help guide website visitors and encourage them to continue engaging with its content. Look here for some clever examples of microinteractions being used today.
WordPress From the Clients’ Perspective
That concludes our deep-dive into the world of web creators. Now, let’s look at some of the things clients say they’re looking for when selecting one:
The data shows that web creators and user experience professionals should be upfront about their rates. You don’t have to offer the lowest rates on the market – in fact, you may hurt your own brand by even trying – but you do need to communicate your expectations early on.
The fact that budgets and aesthetics both rate highly may mean that customers are willing to pay a premium for designers who share their tastes. Upmarket customers will likely reward similarly principled designers with higher rates. Bargain-seekers are likely to spend more time qualifying potential collaborators before committing, which can impact the bottom line.
The consideration for common technology indicates that clients want solutions that don’t require complex integration. They may also be interested in documentation, or the reliability of well-established products. User experience designers with knowledge of the most popular technologies (or specialist knowledge of niche technologies) have much to gain here.
The next consideration demonstrates that clients don’t see their website as a simple finished product. It’s more like an ongoing project that includes on-page SEO, branding, and marketing work – all things the industry used to consider “optional”. Today, they are implicitly expected, even if that expectation isn’t communicated.
Finally, portfolios and recommendations take last place. This suggests that customers see their websites as entirely unique, and dismiss portfolio examples as irrelevant to their own specific projects. This may not be true, but successful web professionals will have to play along when discussing project requirements and avoid anything that resembles a “boilerplate” approach.
Establish a Winning WordPress Strategy for 2022
We hope these insights help you develop a successful strategy for marketing your design skills in today’s challenging(but rewarding) environment. Web creators and user experience professionals have incredible opportunities to expand their capabilities, cultivate new skills, and forge new relationships with customers. The more you know about those customers, the better you can position your brand to meet their needs.
